


This Scepter’d Isle

by rthstewart



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 02:45:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12049686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rthstewart/pseuds/rthstewart
Summary: Digory delivers a lesson on "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."





	This Scepter’d Isle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FiKate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FiKate/gifts).



This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,  
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,  
This other Eden, demi-paradise,  
This fortress built by Nature for herself  
Against infection and the hand of war,  
This happy breed of men, this little world,  
This precious stone set in the silver sea,  
Which serves it in the office of a wall,  
Or as a moat defensive to a house,  
Against the envy of less happier lands,  
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1

* * *

When the Pevensies tumbled out of the wardrobe, stunned, confused and stammering apologies about fur coats gone missing for minutes and years, the first thing Digory did was call for that all-purpose English restorative, tea.

Macready ordered stronger measures. She brushed aside the concerns about the coats – “Not the first thing that’s gone missing in this peculiar house” – and marched the children? Not-children? _Goodness, what were they now?_ – to the bath.  She stoked a brisk fire in the drawing room, dusted off the good crystal, and uncorked a bottle of spirits so fine, even Digory had not been permitted to drink it.

The not-children were, to all appearances, _fine_. When he asked, each said the same though it surely was false, even Lucy, who was not so little anymore, and never lied. But _how_ could they be _fine_ – so banal a term for what they had experienced? He and Polly had most assuredly not been _fine_ , but irrevocably altered, and that after only a few days in Narnia.

The King and Queens relegated him to the role, not of surrogate parent, but of elderly advisor, whose advice was desired only when specifically sought, which was rarely.  They kept to themselves, together or alone, but always a united front of Four; surely, they had ruled in the same way. He overheard names, places, and events that made no sense to him but were of enormous import to the Kings and Queens. Occasionally, Digory saw fretful worry in their raw countenances, concern not so much for their own loss, but for the country they had been torn from. Their succession plan – they had planned for their own deaths – had never assumed all Four taken at once. He was aghast upon realising that whatever contingencies were in place had involved consorts, children, and heirs, now all left behind and perhaps already dead. He didn’t dare ask.

“They don’t know they need help with their loss,” Macready said. Digory suspected the not-children had had significant experience with loss but were now without the customary means for grieving upon their return.  The absence of familiar rituals was readily apparent.

Peter was bristling with energy, even more attentive to the War than he had been before, and following every rumour of the possible Nazi invasion of Britain. After seeing Peter cajoling Edmund to pick the locks on the cases where the weapons were displayed, Macready unlocked the swords, knives, and crossbows. She warned only that such sports were to be enjoyed out-of-doors and somewhere the neighbors wouldn’t comment. Seeing the way Peter swung a broadsword and Lucy flung knives, Digory decided he was not going to interfere if the High King and Valiant Queen marched off to repel a Nazis ground assault on London.

Grave Edmund was so altered from a week past, he was scarce the same person. Digory thought Edmund seemed to carry a particularly heavy burden but saw the warnings and did not attempt to probe.  Edmund would become bitingly irritable, with shades of his old temperament, when prodded too far by his siblings.

“ _I’m_ _fine_. You’re fine. We’re _all_ fine!” Edmund would then storm off to the library and read in an over-stuffed chair in the corner or sift through Digory’s own untidy piles of manuscripts, books, and notes on the table. Digory recognized this desire to seek intellectual answers rather than emotional ones. He, gently, recommended works to Edmund that had helped him to understand Narnia more deeply – the Hopkins and Wordsworth poetry, Plotinus, Scotus, Thoreau, and other writers. Edmund would probably not be able to illuminate his own academic efforts of the last four decades to piece together a coherent philosophy linking Franciscan theology, stewardship for the Earth, and the innate beingness of all things. But should Edmund have an epiphany whilst ruminating on Saint Francis, Digory wouldn’t turn down the contributions, either – with appropriate attribution.

Susan was wistfully eyeing Buttons, the old carthorse, tinkering with the bicycles, and driving Macready spare with her efforts to help manage their small household. Macready would not surrender the house accounting and ration books; she did allow Susan to take charge of the visitors who came to tour the house.

“Susan is accustomed to running an entire country,” Digory tried explaining to Macready. “She surely was their Ambassador, the Chatelaine for their castle, and possibly the Steward for their tenants and lands.”

“Well, she can go chatelaine somewhere else,” Macready grumbled.

Susan, like Peter, needed an outlet for her prodigious energies and talents. Digory spoke to Mrs. Wilkins, a neighbor widow with no help for her farm. Showing herself to no longer be a Londoner at all, Susan exercised the horses, expertly, and at breathtakingly breakneck speeds, enthusiastically worked the garden plots, tended the chickens, goats, and cows, assumed management of Mrs. Wilkins’ egg and vegetable customers in the village, and said she could butcher the hog in a few weeks. She badgered her Royal siblings into joining her work, an occasional distraction from the weapons practices on the lawns that Peter and Lucy would sometimes cajole Edmund into joining.

There were no games of hide and seek.

Amid all the frantic and dirty activity pointedly intended to avoid dwelling upon what had gone before and been left behind, Polly arrived. She had rightly intuited that a puppy, two kittens, and a carpetbag weighted with tea, tins, and, Cadbury milk bars (and he did _not_ want to know but could guess how she had acquired them) would help dissipate the melancholy air of forced cheerfulness that had settled over the house. What he and Polly had thought would be a dramatic revelation of their own adventures in Narnia took a surprising turn when Lucy chanted an epic poem of the Birth of Narnia featuring Lord Digory and Lady Polly in prominent roles.

Polly was absolutely chuffed. “Lady Polly! Can you imagine, Digory?”

“No.”

Polly nudged his shin, hard, with a boot. “We shall have to share a cigar over it.”

That night, there was more tea, even more of the spirits, shared squares of heavenly chocolate, and playing with the kittens, and puppy, who Polly had named Lou, Babe, and Joe after her favorite New York Yankees. Lucy chanted, sang and recited many of the strange, rhythmic tales of the life and lore of Narnia, the founding of Archenland – Frank and Helen’s line still endured! – the Dragon of the Lone Islands, Queen Swanwhite, the Giants in the North, the Stars in the skies, and how gods walked the lands and flowed in the rivers. Macready finally appeared in her dressing gown as the clock was chiming two and chased everyone to bed.

Digory went to his room, dimmed the lamp, sat in his armchair with Eliot's translation of Strauss's _Life of Jesus_ , pushed his door just ajar, and waited for quiet to settle in the house. Strauss was not so engrossing to keep his mind from wandering back to how Queen Lucy had told such enthralling, entertaining and dark stories in her deceptively childlike voice. He would never see the charming girl he had known last week grow up to be the remarkable woman she was now and felt special sympathy for Lucy’s parents and all they had missed, for all their children.

The squeak of a door and soft step in the hall jolted him from the drowse. He waited until he heard the steps move down the hall and up the back stair. When he heard the creak of the door upstairs, he followed. It was very dark with the blackout shades pulled down and all the lights out, but Digory knew every turn in this queer old house.

He caught up with Lucy in the Room, just as she emerged from the Wardrobe.

“You will tell me I am foolish to hope,” she said. The click of the door closing sounded overloud in the still house.

“No, never that, Lucy.”

“But you never went back. Or Polly.”

“No.”

He heard a sniff and Lucy fumbled for a handkerchief in the pocket of her dressing gown. She blew her nose, a messy, forlorn sound. “How did you bear it?”

“We hoped for a very long time that we would someday return. Until, one day…”

Digory paused, suddenly searching for the words he had been rehearsing. Lucy looked up.

“Until one day, Polly and I realized we would never return.”

Lucy sniffed more loudly. “So you gave up?”

“Oh no. Quite the opposite. We began living _here._ ”

He held out his hand. “Come, let’s go outside and perhaps we might hear an owl.”

He pulled on galoshes and together they slipped out the kitchen door. Lucy had added a wrap over her dressing gown but neglected to wear shoes.  Digory opted to not chide the Queen for the deliberate oversight, the prerogative of an advisor, rather than parent.  

Nights were often terrifying and filled with death. But tonight, perhaps it was too cloudy over the Channel. They heard only the drones of familiar aeroplanes.  There were no explosions, searchlights, or sirens.

Lucy strode out ahead, through the damp grass, arms stretched out from her sides. Even in the dark, Digory could see a shadow launch from a branch of the oak tree and flutter away toward the open fields. Glowing eyes under the tree, probably a stoat, blinked.

 _And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;_  
_And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil_  
_Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod._

“What’s that?” Lucy turned about.

“A bit of Hopkins I am fond of. His lament about no more bare feet on grass.”

Her eyes followed two rabbits as they hopped out from the wood and began nosing about. “Will I eventually not be disappointed that they do not speak to me?”

“They are fine rabbits for all that they do not speak.” Odd how thinking so much on Narnia was so clarifying. “They are worthy of our respect and friendship simply for being what they are.”

“Dumb rabbits?”

“Rabbits who are, to our dim understanding, surely the best rabbits that they can be.”

Lucy frowned. “This is a rebuke, isn’t it, for my lamenting that they are not Narnian rabbits?”

“They are English rabbits and they are here, now, enjoying the evening and peacefully eating their supper. Isn’t that enough?”

She turned and stared at the pair. The larger stood on his hind legs and stared back. “I suppose it is hardly fair to blame them for not being what they cannot be.”

“No, it is not fair, especially when there is ample cause to celebrate them for what they _are_.”

Digory tensed at the sound of an aeroplane sputtering toward them, then relaxed, recognizing the distinctive sound of an RAF patrol, probably a Daffy.

The rabbits startled and bounded away. Lucy scowled and gestured up at the belching aeroplane they could hear but not see. “But to celebrate _this,_ Professor? When it is all so _very_ ugly?”

“That it is here at all, that we are here, _still_ , are surely reasons to celebrate.” Digory breathed in the night air deeply, feeling an even deeper gratitude, and waited until the noise faded and the proper nights sounds returned. An owl called, and another answered.

“I am not being fair to England now, am I?” Confirming his suspicions of earlier, Lucy added, “We had wars in Narnia, too.” She slumped a little. “I do wish it were not all so grim.”

Digory ignored this slight against their home. “England is a bit shabby at the moment, I suppose. But then think how much older we are than Narnia.”

“Older?” Lucy frowned.

“From the stories you told, the lack of lingual shift, the Beasts and geography you described, I would be very much surprised if Narnia was more than a few thousand years old, at most. England is millions of years old and her history is immense. Even the fragments we know are astounding for their persistence, for their resilience.  There are bones of prehistoric creatures all over England. The first dinosaur bones identified by science were discovered near St. Paul’s Cathedral. People have probably been in England for over 10,000 years; Stonehenge has stood for over 5,000 years. The Celtic language still survives on these islands.”

The owl, or perhaps another one, silently glided back to the tree and settled on the branch. It blinked and its eyes shone yellow in the darkness. “Think of all the peoples and what they brought with them, and what they gifted the English peoples.  The Celtic tribes, the druids, the Romans, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Normans. England has drawn immigrants from all of Europe, Africa, and Asia."

"And yes, the grit of our cities is daunting, but think on all the wondrous things and people drawn to them.  And we still preserve our wild and lonely places, and the woods, meadows, fields, peaks and moors." And it was very good that English farming persisted, or they would have all starved. 

Of special passion to Lucy, he continued.  "Our storytelling and mythology is so rich.  We have our own fairies, witches, magic, and giants.  There are tales of ancient kings, like Bladud who could fly, and his son, Leir, and his rebellious daughters, and good Queen Cordelia, and all that followed, with Vortigern, Ambrosius, Uther, Arthur, and the prophecies of Merlin.”

“And Saint George and the Dragon.” Lucy was smiling now, a little indulgently. He supposed he had gone off on a tear.

“And Saint George.” He spared her his theory of the legend Saint George as an example of Christianity subsuming an Egyptian myth.

They stood together, silently absorbing the dark and the faint rustles of small animals going about their evening business. 

Eventually, one rabbit and then the other cautiously hopped back out onto the grass. Lucy glanced up at the owl. “I don’t think she’s hungry.” To the rabbits she said, “You may eat in peace, friends.”

The quiet stretched longer, dark and comforting.

“This is what you meant about living here rather than Narnia?” Lucy finally said. “This passion for England and everyone in it; not expecting this world to be like Narnia but to appreciate what is special here.”

“And to love and care for things for what they are, as they are,” Digory added. He knew he would be revising Chapter 2 of his book for the rest of the week.

Lucy crouched down in the grass and held out a long sprig of clover. The rabbits hopped away warily. “Is this why you became a Professor? To teach others to see the world this way?" 

“It is, though my students are usually more awake for logic and history than this novel philosophy.” She laughed, sounding more like the girl of a week ago. He put out his hand to help her rise.

“I do not have the answers,” Digory admitted as they slowly walked back to the house. They were both yawning. “Narnia was Aslan’s gift. It took me a long time to understand how to honour that gift by putting it into practice.”

Lucy crammed her soggy handkerchief back into her dressing gown pocket. He would have to remember to warn Macready when they did the wash. “I don’t know how to do that Professor. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

“We will help you, Queen Lucy the Valiant.”

At the back stoop to the kitchen door, Lucy turned and stood two steps above him. She set her hands on his shoulders and Digory saw a golden, smiling Queen where a little girl in a shabby dressing gown had been.

“Lord Digory, Narnia thanks you, for your service to Her, both here and there, and to her Kings and Queens.”

Digory bowed his head and accepted a beneficent kiss from his Queen.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to ___ for the beta!


End file.
